Chapter 27
Lark
This damned IV in my arm was the hill I was prepared to die on.
The bag hung on its pole beside the bed, dripping something into my system that I probably needed but deeply resented, because as long as that line was in me, I was a patient in this hospital and not a person.
I’d been making my case to every nurse who’d walked through the door since yesterday morning, and not a single one of them had been swayed by my arguments, my charm, or what I suspected was a fairly pathetic attempt at puppy eyes, given the current state of my face.
Three days, I’d been in this bed with the same blue curtain and the same beeping monitor and the same view of a parking lot through a window that didn’t open.
My ribs ached when I breathed too deeply.
My wrists were raw where the zip ties had bitten in.
My left eye had gone from swollen shut to a shade of purple I could almost convince myself was fuchsia, except fuchsia was cheerful and this was not.
Logan sat in the chair beside my bed, one ankle crossed over his knee, scrolling through something on his phone.
He’d been in that chair so often over the past three days that the nurses had stopped asking him to leave during shift changes.
They just worked around him. One of them had brought him a pillow yesterday without being asked.
The first thirty-six hours of being here had come back in pieces.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, the fluorescent lights swimming above me each time I surfaced.
Logan was there every time. Sitting in that chair or standing by the window or leaning forward with his elbows on the mattress and his hand around mine.
The first thing I asked, every single time, was about the animals. I couldn’t get the image of the burning barn out of my mind.
“They all made it out,” he told me. Same calm voice, each time. No matter how many times I asked. “Every one of them. Even Clarence. Although, we were tempted to leave him.”
I’d made him tell me over and over how the guys had figured it out, how they’d gotten there in time, how Tova had led Logan to me.
Never once had Logan gotten impatient or frustrated with telling me. He’d understood how much I’d needed to hear it.
But somewhere deep inside me wasn’t going to believe it was truly true until I saw my babies were safe with my own eyes.
Lachlan had come by yesterday. He’d sat in the chair where Logan was now, his badge clipped to his belt, a notebook open on his knee, and asked for my statement. I gave him everything Carter had confessed in that car.
The grants he’d killed, the mortgage he’d bought through Pinnacle, the letters, the payments, the acceleration clause. I told him about the fire, the device on Carter’s phone, the access road. I answered every question as clearly as I could manage through the fog of painkillers and concussion.
Carter was currently under arrest. No doubt his family would get him the best lawyers money could buy. He would deny everything he said to me in that car, but Lachlan said it didn’t matter. There would still be a paper trail Carter couldn’t hide.
The problem with a paper trail was that it could take quite a while to unravel it all.
Which meant Pawsitive was still in deep financial trouble.
“Isaac’s loan covers the acceleration clause,” I said, picking up a conversation we’d been circling for close to an hour. “That’s still got to be paid even though Carter was behind it. He technically didn’t do anything illegal there. Even getting my grants pulled wasn’t illegal.”
Logan looked up from his phone, once again patient even though we’d covered this topic multiple times too. “You’ll get more grants. We’ll apply immediately. Without that asshole making sure they don’t go through, there’s no reason to think you won’t get them like you have in the past.”
“I know. Eventually.” I shifted against the pillows and winced when my ribs reminded me they existed. “But eventually doesn’t pay for a barn that isn’t standing anymore.”
He put his phone completely away and took my hand.
“Without the barn, there are no training sessions,” I said.
“No placements, no therapy programs, no birthday parties. Everything we built to generate income is now gone.” I picked at the tape on my IV line because my hands needed something to do and the hospital hadn’t provided a clipboard.
“I’m not spiraling. I’m just looking at all the angles. ”
“I know you’re not spiraling.”
“I am a little bit spiraling.”
“I know that too.” He leaned forward in the chair and rested his forearms on the mattress. “We’ll figure it out.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
I looked at him. The stubble on his jaw had gone past the point of deliberate and into the territory of a man who hadn’t left a hospital room long enough to shave.
There were circles under his eyes. His shirt was wrinkled in a way that would have driven the military-neat version of Logan Stroud to iron it on principle.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in three days, because he probably hadn’t. He’d been in that chair, or close to it, since I woke up.
“I love you,” I said.
I’d wanted to say it the night everything fell apart. I’d typed everything else in that text but held this back because I wanted to say it to his face. My face was purple now and my arm had an IV in it, and it was still the right time.
“I love you, Logan. I should have said it before.”
His fingers squeezed mine on the mattress. He turned my hand over and pressed his thumb into my palm, and the roughness of his skin against the raw place where the zip ties had been should have hurt but didn’t.
“I love you too, little bird.” He said it steady and plain, no extra words around it. “That’s not changing. And I’m not going anywhere.”
I looked at the ceiling and blinked hard. I was not going to cry in this hospital room.
“You know what the worst part of being in here is?” I said, after a minute.
“The IV you won’t stop complaining about?”
“Besides the IV.” I rubbed my thumb across his knuckles. “Nobody came to visit me.”
The words hung between us. I heard them land and wished I could pull them back, because they sounded smaller out loud than they had inside my head.
“Lachlan came, but that was for my statement.” I kept my voice light and practiced.
“I know people are taking care of the animals. The whole town is helping, and I appreciate it so much. I would never expect anyone to sit in a hospital room when there are sixty displaced animals that need managing.”
Logan was watching me, and I kept going because stopping meant sitting in the silence of what I’d just admitted.
“But it would’ve been nice if someone had come by to visit, you know?
Just for a minute. I would expect a no-show from my family if I wasn’t on death’s door.
But I guess I’d just thought of the people in Garnet Bend and Resting Warrior Ranch as being my family sort of.
” I tried to smile, but it pulled at the split in my lip and I stopped. “It’s fine. I’m being ridiculous.”
“You’re not being ridiculous.”
“That’s debatable.”
Something crossed his face. It wasn’t disagreement. It was something I couldn’t quite read, there and then gone, replaced by a steadiness that felt deliberate.
“The people in this town care about you, Lark. You know that. You’ve seen it. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Yeah, right. I know. I blame the IV. They’re obviously giving me the crazy drugs.”
He squeezed my hand and let the conversation go, and I felt stupid for having brought it up. People had more important things to do than sit in a hospital room with a woman who was mostly fine and a self-pity streak she was ashamed of.
I watched the parking lot through the window for a while, and then I couldn’t watch it anymore.
“I want to go home. Today. I know the doctors said tomorrow, but I want to go today.”
Logan’s hand stilled on mine.
“I need to see it, Logan. I need to stand on my property and look at whatever is left and start figuring out what comes next. I can’t do that from this bed.”
“You have a concussion. Your ribs—”
“My ribs will hurt just as much tomorrow as they do today. One more night in this bed is not going to change anything except make me lose my mind.”
He was quiet. I could see him weighing it, and the fact that he was weighing it at all sent a flare of heat through my chest.
“We said no more of this,” I said. “No more deciding for each other. You promised me that.”
“I’m not deciding for you. I’m asking you to consider staying one more night.”
“And I’ve considered it. I want to go home.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes, and it wasn’t the look of a man who’d lost an argument. It was something else, something closer to regret than defeat. He took a breath, let it go, and nodded.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Let me go talk to the nurses and get the paperwork started. I’ll bring the truck around.”
He stood, leaned down, and kissed my forehead. His lips were warm and careful against the bruise at my temple, and he held there for a second longer than he needed to.
The road from the hospital to Pawsitive was the longest twenty minutes of my life. I tried to prepare myself for what I would see. I didn’t want to get blindsided by the charred ruins of the barn. I knew it would be hard to see.
I knew it would be an ugly reminder that I might still lose Pawsitive. That I might still have to call my parents and beg for money.
Logan drove with one hand on the wheel. I stared through the windshield and braced myself for blackened ground, empty paddocks, and the skeleton of a building that had held every animal I’d given five years of my life to protect.
He reached across the console and laced his fingers through mine. I looked at our joined hands. This. This was what I needed to be focusing on. That I wasn’t in this alone. Still, I knew what faced me in a few minutes was going to be the toughest thing I’d ever been through.